The basic principle that every person should be treated fairly has been eroded across too many of our public institutions.
The public sector equality duty (PSED) has fuelled a culture of identity politics and exposed every significant public decision to legal challenge.
This is wrong.
Watch Kemi Badenoch set out our plan to scrap the PSED and ensure equal treatment under the law for everyone 👇.
Read Andrew Dinsmore's report here.
And read Kemi Badenoch's speech below
Good morning everyone. First of all, can I start by thanking the Institute for Government for hosting this speech on a very important and very sensitive matter.
The body cam footage of Henry Nowak's death is one of the hardest things I've ever watched, because I knew what was going to happen.
As I was watching it I found myself willing the police to stop. Willing them to think, to at least consider Henry's story, and to check if he had been stabbed.
A lot of people had given all sorts of opinions, some had blamed social media, others have blamed knives, racism, the police, some have tried to score political points and others have tried to avoid seeing what was there for all of us to see.
There has been a recrimination and finger pointing, and believe me that many I would like to point my finger at, the job of a politician is to not to tell people to be angry or make people angry, it is to offer solutions.
Henry's family could not have been clearer that they don’t want his debt to be used as a divide.
I met them last week they are brave but broken-hearted, none of us would want to be in their shoes.
What they want is for something could to come out of the outpouring of public shock and grief. They want the police to become an institution that we can trust again, and if we want to honour that wish, to honour Henry's memory, we need ask the right question.#
I believe that question is why did the police take an accusation of racism more seriously, than the claim that Henry had been stabbed?
This question goes beyond policing.
Why are public bodies so unable to act with common sense when race or identity is involved?
Why they are so distracted with things that are nothing to do with the core function?
In March I gave a speech, explaining that the Conservative party will remove identity politics from all public bodies.
The speech I'm giving today is the result of work we have been doing over many months.
Some of what I am going to say is going to be very uncomfortable, but our job as legislators is to ask uncomfortable questions so that we can do the right thing for the country, and the right thing for the country is to make sure the circumstances around Henry's tragic death never happen again.
It is easy to blame the police officers who responded to that 999 call for what happened. The person was to blame is Henry's murderer, but the lack of common sense and the lack of compassion shown by the police were shocking.
Something clearly went very wrong and that is why I asked the Prime Minister for rapid and independent review.
In some ways I feel for those police officers because they have been following guidance they have trained on, guidance that does not apply equality under the law, guidance that as hate crimes should be treated as a priority.
Many people don’t know what is in the guidance and that is why it needs to be exposed.
This country was built on a belief in equality under the law, Magna Carta, the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage.
Over centuries we have enshrined in our law that everybody is equal.
There is a reason Lady Justice is blindfolded.
The idea that each person should be treated the same regardless of who they are, is a value so deeply ingrained in our culture that most people in Britain accept it as a self-evident truth.
But while we have been going about our business, activists have been taking Lady Justice’s blindfold off.
They want the law to treat people differently on the basis of identity groups,
Eroding a centuries old principle that has made Britain the amazing country it is today.
Equality law properly designed, should protect us all in the same way.
It should be a shield, not a sword.
It should protect people from discrimination.
It should protect people from being treated differently because of their race, sex, religion, sexuality, disability or age.
This understanding, and this principle, are being perverted.
Treating people equally and fairly will not deliver equality of outcome because sometimes a difference in outcome is fair.
Modern Britain is the least racist country on earth.
I speak from experience. As a child I lived on three different continents I have seen what life is like for ethnic minorities in other places.
There is nowhere else on earth I would rather be.
There is nowhere else on earth I would be doing the job that I am doing right now, as a black woman in a majority white country.
It is because we are not racist, because we care so much about equality, that we have overcorrected and brought in rules that are actually discriminatory.
How did this happen?
When we saw high profile incidents of injustice, like the murder of Stephen Lawrence, there was rightly public pressure to ensure an injustice like that never happened again.
Stephen Lawrence’s murder resulted in the influential MacPherson report, a report that wanted to put right what went wrong with policing in the 1990s.
However, in attempting to do so, it also enshrined a principle which I believe is wrong, that “a racist incident is racist, if it is perceived as racist by the victim or any other person.”
This may have made sense in a different context long ago,
But today when we look at the response to Henry Nowak’s murder, and the police’s acceptance that the murderer was correct when he accused Henry of racism it’s clear that mere accusations are being accepted as facts.
The MacPherson report led in 2001 to the Race Equality Duty which then morphed in the Equality Act to the Public Sector Equality Duty, which is what I will be talking about today, covering everything from race to sex to sexuality and much more.
What do the Nottingham murders, the Southport attack, the Manchester Arena bombings and the rape gangs all have in common?
All these crimes could have been stopped if people had intervened instead of having a fear of being called racist.
We would not have had so many girls abused by rape gangs if local authorities had not looked away because they were too scared to point out the obvious.
That’s why those unspeakable crimes went on for years.
One parent told me that when she gave the description of her daughter’s abuser, the police accused her of being racist.
If the security guards at the Manchester Arena weren’t afraid of being accused of racial profiling, we wouldn’t have seen a bomber walk into the venue unchecked.
If authorities weren’t concerned that black people were overrepresented in mental health units, three people would not have been murdered in Nottingham by a man who should have been detained under the mental health act.
And if authorities hadn’t chalked up Axel Rudakubana’s violent behaviour to autism, if his headteacher hadn’t been accused of racial stereotyping when she raised concerns about him bringing a knife into school, three little girls might still be with us.
These families are all living a life sentence, because others were too scared to raise the alarm.
Some people will try to make race the cause of the crime.
Race is not the cause of those crimes,
But it is the reason these crimes are not being prevented.
If public services were prioritising their duty to citizens, the last words Henry Nowak ever heard would not have been a police officer reading him his rights.
Each of these tragedies is different, but they expose a common weakness:
Authorities conditioned to see minority status as victimhood.
They withhold information, they avoid difficult conversations and they allow reputational concerns to dominate their decision-making.
They have spent so long worrying about institutional racism, that they have become institutionally incompetent.
They are systematically failing to fulfil their role, to do what they are there to do,
In the case of the police, to catch criminals, section people whose mental health demands it, investigate suspicious behaviour.
Confidence in our institutions is now collapsing.
And how could it not?
When people can see, as in my own constituency, Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities breaking laws that no one else would get away with.
When rapists are put in women’s prisons because the justice system prioritises the protected characteristic of gender reassignment over women’s privacy, dignity and safety.
When people see pro-Palestinian marchers chanting slogans that others would be sent to jail for Tweeting, people will believe in two-tier policing when they see this.
Common sense has gone out of the window, and people are left wondering which rules apply to whom.
You can see how we got here.
Each time a high-profile case involving race happened, like the shooting of Mark Duggan in the 2011 London riots or in 2022, the shooting of Chis Kaba, a man under suspicion of a double murder, police officers like Martyn Blake, were dragged through long and degrading public inquiries.
These institutions stopped worrying about getting the law wrong and worried desperately about a career-ending accusation of racism.
The safest path for them to avoid this accusation was not common sense or the facts in front of them,
it was to follow the process so people replaced thinking with box-ticking.
They outsourced decision making to activists and left-wing pressure groups.
I will give you an example, the head of the supposedly Independent Scrutiny and Oversight Board, a board which audits the police race action plans, tweeted about defunding the police.
She was asked about her comments on the Today Programme yesterday and defended her views.
Some of these people don’t believe we should have a police service at all.
So I want to be clear, the Conservative Party is the party of law and order.
We are the party of law and order and we want to fund, not defund the police.
And the reason why we want to triple stop and search and hire 10,000 more police officers is because we believe this will lead to safer streets.
I’m afraid it doesn’t matter if more black boys are searched, because it means more black lives will be saved.
The police’s own guidance now explicitly says that people should be treated differently based on their protected characteristics.
Equality under the law, this guiding principle on which our great nation was built, is being thrown away.
Some will ask “why didn’t you do anything in Government”?
I did. And I paid a price for it.
I challenged the idea that every disparity is racism. I stopped terrible guidance and legislation asking us to treat Covid as a racist disease!
I backed work showing that white working-class boys were among the most disadvantaged children in Britain, if not the most disadvantaged.
That did not fit the institutional racism story, so I was attacked for it.
But I didn’t back down because if the facts embarrass your ideology, the problem is your ideology, not the facts.
I remember being called all sorts of names. I was called a coconut, an Uncle Tom, the “black face of white supremacy”, not just by activists and silly academics but even Labour MPs, people who should have known better.
And that is why today I am not bothered by Reform MPs promoting fake adverts quoting me out of context. Nobody believes their lies. Not even Nigel Farage who praised me for my stance at the time.
I met police chiefs, the Met, Police and Crime Commissioners and the College of Policing. I told them plainly, race action plans born out of Black Lives Matter would create the very mistrust they wanted to would solve.
I warned at the time that there would be a backlash.
I published the evidence. I issued guidance. I wrote to public bodies again and again telling them the same thing, equality means treating people as individuals, not sorting them into groups.
I did everything within my power.
But the Equalities Minister can only warn. She has no power to command every police force, NHS trust, school and council in the country.
Some listened. Others simply stalled, waiting for a Labour government or another minister, who would indulge this ideology. The police pointed to the Macpherson report when I spoke to them, and told me that I was wrong, that disparities in outcomes proved they must be institutionally racist. This was the police telling me that.
But I didn’t back down then, and I am not going to back down now.
I have spent my political career fighting against identity politics on the left when it came from Labour, Lib Dems, the SNP,
And I will do exactly the same against identity politics when it comes from Reform UK.
The answer to Black Lives Matter is not a White Lives Matter born of the same racial grievance.
We will not defeat identity politics by building a mirror-image of it.
There is a silent majority across our country who want order, fairness, common sense and one law for everyone.
Everyone matters.
These are the people the Conservative Party stands for and that is the country we can be again.
This isn’t about replacing one bureaucracy with another, I hate bureaucracy!
The Conservative answer to this problem rests on three principles. Three principles that distinguish us from every other party:
The first is universalism.
That means every citizen must be treated as an individual, not as part of a group.
The second is that differences in outcome are not proof of discrimination.
Just because men and women, or the young and old have differences, doesn’t mean these problems, these are problems of sexism or ageism.
We need to examine the facts and evidence before ideology. If you diagnose everything as racism or sexism or ageism, you won’t solve the underlying issue.
The third principle is that we rebuild trust in failing institutions, not undermine them.
We must find the root cause of failure and tackle it, rather than destroying trust for political or other gain.
Conservatives believe in our institutions.
Institutions are not perfect, but we want to fix a broken system, not smash it to pieces because we are angry.
And don’t get me wrong, we are angry. I am angry.
But rage is not a strategy, rage is not a solution.
In March, I gave a speech about separatism, and how we need to remove identity politics from public life.
I asked the respected barrister Andrew Dinsmore to advise me on how we do this, and how we bring back the principle of meritocracy and equality under the law.
This is the solution,
There are so many problems to fix, many of them are currently being caused by the Public Sector Equality Duty in the Equality Act.
This Duty is subjective, with no clear rules, and whatever its intention in practice, it has become a minefield that exposes almost every significant public decision to legal challenge.
It is astonishing that late last year, the government lost a case in the high court against a group of dangerous prisoners.
These were prisoners convicted of Islamic terrorism.
They were separated from other prisoners to stop them spreading their ideology.
But a court found that prison officers had breached their duty because this separation was disproportionately affecting Muslims.
This is crazy.
These terrorists could now be eligible for compensation.
This is madness.
This Duty is compromising security decisions like isolating dangerous criminals in case the terrorists call us racists.
Far from equal outcomes, this duty is leading to ludicrous outcomes.
Like Norfolk Police telling a job applicant that because of her ‘gender critical’ views, i.e. biological sex is real, that she would not be ‘suitable’.
The Public Sector Equality Duty has turned equality into a zero-sum game, where some groups are preferred over others,
And the more public bodies chase equality of outcome, the further they move from equal treatment and equality under the law.
That’s why I can announce today that a Conservative government will repeal the Public Sector Equality Duty in its entirety.
We do not need to replace the duty,
We need to explain to people that they should do their jobs.
I was elected leader of the Conservative Party because I promised to unravel the Blairite legal settlement.
There are many laws which were brought in with good intentions but are delivering perverse outcomes and unintended consequences.
We are making policy changes carefully and thoughtfully, as proved by the serious piece of work done by Andrew Dinsmore.
I don’t want this to be a party-political issue, I would very much like this to be a cross-party issue.
This is not a left or right-wing problem. It is a common-sense problem.
But currently, we are the only party that recognises what this issue is.
Labour are not yet sure anything is wrong,
And Reform, Reform who are talking about White Lives Matter, announced that they would abolish the entire Equality Act.
So let me be clear, that would mean that it would be legal to discriminate against white people. Is that really what they want?
They’re not doing their homework.
What Reform don’t understand is that anti-discrimination legislation protects us all.
Because it is race and sex that are protected, not being black or white, male or female.
The Equality Act protects a white man as much as a black woman,
But the Public Sector Equality Duty does not.
That’s why we are going to overhaul the Act, starting by removing this Duty.
This is not just a technical change to the law,
This is part of our plan to remove identity politics entirely from the public sector.
Hopefully the private sector will follow suit because they have this problem too,
But government should get its own house in order first.
So let me conclude with a story from when I was Local Government Minister in 2021.
Some councils spend up to 70 per cent of their funding on social care, a burden which was crushing many of them.
I wanted to allocate more money to councils who had greater social care responsibilities,
But my officials told me that because of the Public Sector Equality Duty, we would be sued because the policy would disproportionately benefit white, elderly, Christian people.
I told them I was happy to be sued,
Because any ounce of common sense would tell you that the majority of people in Britain needing social care are white, elderly, Christian people.
This isn’t just about our public institutions.
It is about our culture and who we are as a country.
For years, people have been encouraged to see themselves as part of an identity group, rather than one culture, and one nation.
Britain must reject tribal politics from both left and right.
The Conservatives are not choosing one identity group over another,
We are saying government must look after everybody.
And we must fix this for the sake of our children.
Otherwise, we will leave them a more dangerous and more divided world.
It is not fair on black or white children to grow up unable to trust the police.
If we want Henry Nowak’s tragic death to have a positive legacy, it must be a country brought together rather than one pulled apart.
And for trust in our police and public services to be rebuilt.
That will only happen when we take ideology out of these institutions, restore equal treatment, and give good public servants the confidence to use common sense.
Britain must be brought back to the principle that protects us all,
Equality under the law, one rule book, one standard, and only one public duty,
To serve the country equally.
